knittr

about

knittr is a tool to brush up knitting patterns for printing. You can for example start with a 16x16 pixel smilie icon and generate a full-page knitting pattern from it.

Features are:

• scalable vector graphics output
• multi-page output (eg. use full page width and generate multiple pages vertically)
• configurable grid, column and row numbers
• mark every other row (distingish left and right rows)

The project homepage is at https://github.com/mmitch/knittr/

but why

My wife wanted to create her own knitting patterns. The internet is full of instructions saying "open Gimp, zoom in 1600%, activate the grid, print a screenshot", which from my nerd standpoint is totally lame and has certain drawbacks:

• resolution is limited by your screen size
• no row and column numbering
• only square pixels (stitches are seldom square as I have learnt)

So I first wrote a shell script to overcome these limitations and make my wife happy. In the end, things escalated, the shell script turned into this Java application, I got My Little Pony themed sweaters and pillows out of it as well as my own Java GUI library and multiple nights of coding. Yaaaay!

dependencies

• for running knittr:

  • Java runtime (at least Java 6)

• for building knittr:

  • Gradle build environment
  • bash, perl for extended build tools (both optional)

usage

usage: knittr.jar [options ...] [--] [<inputfile>]

available options:
  --layout=<layout>    - set layout
  --style=<style>      - set look and feel
  --help               - show this help text

use `help' for <layout> or <style> to a list available options

quickstart guide

1. Run java -jar knittr.jar to start a new knittr project.

2. Select a bitmap to be converted as source file. The bitmap will show up in the preview. Small bitmaps with few and different colors will work best. The bitmap needs to be preprocessed so that one pixel corresponds to one stitch.

3. Select a target file to contain the result of the conversion. Target file format is SVG. This file will be overwritten!

4. Go to the gauge swatch tab and enter the stitches and rows values for your yarn. stitches means the number of horizontal stitches you need to knit 10cm (4in), while rows means the number of vertical rows you need to knit 10cm (4in). Both values are used to provide proper scaling of your output.

5. Select Render to SVG. Afterwards, open and print the generated SVG with your favourite SVG editor or viewer.

6. You can Save and Load knittr projects for later use or for experimenting with different settings.

7. Try out the settings in the other tabs!

building with Gradle

Building via build.gradle should be straightforward.

There are some additional build targets available:

• run directly starts the knittr UI

• fullJar builds a jar containing all dependencies in build/libs/knittr-full.jar

• fixit runs a bash script to fix line breaks and indentation on empty lines

• checkl10n checks the .property files for missing translations

• publishDropbox and publishDropboxFull copy the generated jars to my Dropbox to sync them to my wife's computer - this propably is of no use to you :-)

copyright

knittr - brush up knitting patterns for printing
Copyright (C) 2014 Christian Garbs mitch@cgarbs.de Licensed under GNU GPL v3 (or later)

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/.